It is no secret, the number of posts on this blog have been few and far in between in the last few months. School has been crazy. My thesis is finished, I presented it at a research symposium. I’m ready to be back in Minnesota, blogging again, and hanging out with good friends.
My finals load is not too heavy, but I can’t wait to graduate!
Okay, let us overcome the extreme lack of blogging lately. Personally, I’ve hit a stretch of business in the past month, which will probably not subside until graduation. On that note, I believe seniors at the UofM should be graduating pretty soon, including Mr. Schoppe. Congratulations! Unfortunately, my graduation is not until June 19 (f-ing quarters).
But, I want to let everyone know that my brother, who is graduating from high school, and I will be having a party on June 27th. I’ll be releasing more details later and have a formal invitation process, but I just wanted to give everyone a heads up. My parents had a pool put in at the end of last summer, so it should be a lot of fun. I just need to harass a bunch of people in MN to come.
Anywho, everyone get blogging again!
I’m sitting down, trying to brainstorm a blog post. Usually, if I don’t have much to say, I don’t say anything or I dig through my drafts to find something relevant. It is kind of funny to look through the few unfinished blog posts and see the no-longer relevant titles like “Happy New Year!” and “Happy Holidays” or analysis from the elections.
I have been less of news-whore since this fall’s campaign, so I’ve missed a few opportunities to post articles that have been of interest to me. Plus, I’m not sure what people like more: my political grand-standing or just daily musings? Let me know.
For today, I came up with this title. “Keeping Busy”. In some respects, I thought this title laughable. What does it really mean to be busy? I can say from personal experience that my perception of business inflates how busy I actually am. This is true for everyone. The things that matter most to us are those that most directly affect us. Obviously, our schedule and daily routine is one of the main things affecting each of us everyday.
I talked to Dan yesterday. He was providing me even more help with my recent server project. Earlier in the day, he couldn’t text me because he was at work. I felt busy doing homework, but my day was constrained only by myself and a late-night practice. Dan was stuck at work, constrained by losing his job if he chose to just walk out. I feel busy everyday at school, as the work piles up and midterms get closer, but again that is constrained by time and the work I put in before that day.
At times, it is easy to feel infinitely busy, in other words so busy you cannot get everything done. Often this is true, there are only so many hours in a day. But how often is this case only because of choices we have made earlier? Probably always.
There is another constraint though, besides the ones driving you toward 100% productivity. Any human being that I know needs to relax, we can’t be busy all the time. Ironically, I find myself stressed out all too often trying to figure out how I’m going to relax. Sometimes…you can plan too much.
I chose the title keeping busy to reflect the effort that goes into staying on task and the lack of effort which can create business. To put it another way, both choices are keeping me busy.
While it is easy to exaggerate beyond anything reasonable. We also have to consider that I spend some time playing video games, watching movies, and surfing the web. Evidently, there is free time to be had. My goal for this Spring is to focus some of that free time into working out more. Past winters, I have replaced running, swimming, biking, and playing tennis with lifting. Too cold to be outside, so go to the gym. This winter, let’s just say I did not go to the gym as much as I would have liked. So I need to get back into shape. I firmly believe that being back in Minneapolis will foster that activity. It is one of the best places to run, bike, and just be outside.
Everyone…you’ve had fair warning. Pump up your bike tires, get out your tennis rackets, and get ready for summer (it’s coming…I swear!).
It’s spring break and I could not be happier to have classes over! My most difficult final, econometrics, went fairly well. I answered all the questions (which I’m quite happy about), so we’ll see if the answers were right.
Monica and I are heading west. Monica wants us to end up at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. I want us to end up in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. We’ll see what happens.
We stayed the night in down-state Illinois and we trucked through Missouri today and decided to do some sight-seeing in Kansas City. I’m excited, there is a really nice area called the Power and Light District that I look forward to exploring and getting a few drinks.
I hope everyone is having a great break (even though Minnesota lost).
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This is something I’ve been working on for a little bit. It did not turn out quite as amazingly as I’d hoped. I plan on reworking it with some things tschwab has sent me and making it a bit funkier. This is what I am dubbing the classic mix because it maintains 90% of the classic rock feel. I have to give a shout out to tschwab for helping me on this and I can’t wait to drop some of his guitar riffs in here.
I have a deadline of tomorrow, so this is where the progress is ending for now.
Hope you like it.
Well, this is my second to last set of final exams for undergrad. Overall, I’m pretty excited about that. But as Dan discussed in his last post, it is not exactly the best time to be graduating. Nonetheless, it certainly signifies a transition to something new. Needless to say, I will not ever be reattending an undergraduate institution after I do this. I’m taking economics degree and running with it.
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Working on this project really exposed my lack of music talent. Using sounds from http://www.freesound.org I transformed and processed them and put it all together into this. The theme of the piece is transit-based noises. This was hard. Working with non-musical noise in a musical sphere is tough.
My classmates did some interesting work on this project…This is what I ended up with.
I’ve been inspired to write this post preparing for a research paper. This is not meant for blogging, but more for writing essays (but could still apply).
In high school, the five paragraph essay was firmly ingrained into our brains. Throughout college, I’ve enjoyed deviating from this standard. The occasional one sentence paragraph will appear. This is fairly easy to integrate into informal, reflection or reaction papers. It is more difficult to integrate into technical, research papers.
But I believe the value is the same. For a class, I spent the last 50 minutes looking at two articles that appeared in respectable periodicals.
Structure 1:
Long/Long/Short/Short/Long/Long
Structure 2:
Short/Short/Medium/Long
Both articles presented scientific ideas meant for a college-educated audience. #2 confused me and I gave up halfway through the last paragraph. Just by looking at the presentation of the paragraphs, you could tell the author kept coming up with more ideas to include and finally jammed everything into the last paragraph. Had he cut it off after three sentences, I would have followed along perfectly.
#1, uses short paragraphs to connect his ideas and make a segway from one complicated idea to another. It turns out that complex ideas presented in a simple format are easier to digest. This simple truth is something everyone should consider.
I’ll say it again – complex ideas in a simple form become simpler. This is the goal of presenting technical information to a less knowledgeable audience.
If you are still stuck in the mode of the 5 paragraph essay, then consider this. If you are just writing longer versions of that style, consider this.
The presentation of your ideas can matter just as much as what you have to say.
If you need the full version, buy me a beer and send 10 Euro cents over paypal.
I’m pretty sure, I have posted about this before. If you think that I haven’t see Line 1. If you have some inkling, then get this patch:
I’m an economics major, who happens to be graduating this year. I have decided to write a Senior Honors thesis. That basically means I’m doing a legit research project and will write a big paper about it.
I have chosen to conduct research in the area of transportation economics. I’ve worked in transportation for several years and find the economic aspect of it interesting. Specifically, I’m going to analyze gasoline price elasticity of demand and the elasticity of demand for vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This will mean I’m going to run regressions with the left hand variable being Quantity of Gasoline consumed and Vehicle Miles Traveled.
If you’ve had a statistics course, you should be following along okay so far. If you’re interested in doing econometric research download the program STATA and start inputting some of your own data.
I’m gathering data now and will post some of the results as I get them. The end goal being, of course, to impress you with my mediocre econometric knowledge.
One of my classmates mixed this…I thought it was worth posting
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